Overview

In the late twentieth century, artists were on the front lines of the culture wars. Leaders of the Christian Right in the U.S. made a national spectacle out of feminist and queer art, blasting it as sacrilegious or pornographic--and sometimes both. On the bully pulpits of television and talk radio, as well as in the halls of Congress, conservatives denounced artists ranging from Robert Mapplethorpe and Judy Chicago to Marlon Riggs and David Wojnarowicz. Conservatives, alarmed by shifting sex and gender norms, collided with progressive artists who were confronting sexism, homophobia, and racism. In Provoking Religion, Anthony Petro offers a compelling new history of the culture wars that places competing moralities of gender and sexuality alongside competing visions of the sacred. The modern culture wars, he shows, are best understood not as contests pitting religious conservatives against secular activists, but as a series of ongoing historical struggles to define the relationship between the sacred and the political.Through captivating case studies of ""subversive"" artists, Provoking Religion illuminates the underside of the culture wars, revealing how progressive artists and activists rendered from those most apparently profane aspects of human life-the stuff of conservatives' worst nightmares--their own haunting visions of the sacred.

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9780190938437

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Reviews

Anthony Petro's robustly interdisciplinary Provoking Religion expertly reimagines the terms and tactics of the Culture Wars. Revealing how the late-twentieth-century battle narrative pivoted around a divide managed by White Christian conservatives, their oppositional claims to ""moral authority,"" and the reductive vise of their ""literalist aesthetics,"" Petro illuminates the religion(s) and plural complexities and communities of the largely queer and feminist artists the wars staged as uniformly “secular.” Impressively innovative and smart, Provoking Religion issues a timely clarion in the literatures on religion and art, and well beyond.” Sally Promey, author of Religion in Plain View: Public Aesthetics of American Display Petro powerfully reorients our vision of how religion figures into the work of queer and feminist artists such as Ray Navarro, Judy Chicago, and Renée Cox. Moving beyond the flattening associations of their art with secular critique, Petro explores their sustained engagement-at once pained and playful-with religious traditions and symbols. The histrionics over sacrilege and obscenity give way to the subtle interpretation of visual and performance art so often shrouded by the canned narratives of the culture wars."" Leigh Eric Schmidt, Washington University in St. Louis Petro's perceptive and pathbreaking book marks a major reframing of the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s, dispelling a long-invoked binary that has placed religion and spirituality at odds with queer and feminist art. Instead, Provoking Religion reveals not only how artists like Judy Chicago, David Wojnarowicz, and Renée Cox wrestled with religion but re-reads Christian opponents for their own aesthetic values. An interdisciplinary and theoretically rich intervention that will reshape how we understand recent U.S. history."" Stephen Vider, author of The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity After World War II Is it possible to turn the page on the seemingly endless US debates called ""culture wars""? Anthony Petro's enlivening book suggests we can, particularly if we attend more carefully to the history, forms, symbols, aesthetics, and language of these debates. In a book teeming with life, death, art, spirit, realism, relativism, and vision (among many other qualities), the reader can learn about religion and history while also beginning to imagine new iconographies and new worlds."" Janet R. Jakobsen, author of The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics Anthony Petro's robustly interdisciplinary Provoking Religion expertly reimagines the terms and tactics of the Culture Wars. Revealing how the late-twentieth-century battle narrative pivoted around a divide managed by White Christian conservatives, their oppositional claims to ""moral authority,"" and the reductive vise of their ""literalist aesthetics,"" Petro illuminates the religion(s) and plural complexities and communities of the largely queer and feminist artists the wars staged as uniformly ""secular."" Impressively innovative and smart, Provoking Religion issues a timely clarion in the literatures on religion and art, and well beyond. * Sally Promey, Author of Religion in Plain View: Public Aesthetics of American Display *

Author Information

Anthony M. Petro is Associate Professor of Religion and of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Boston University. His first book, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion, was a finalist for the Religion Newswriters Association's book award for nonfiction. An early chapter from this book also won the 2012 LGBTQ Religious History Award from the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network. In 2019-2020, Petro was a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.

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